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The Edges and Foundations of the Good Context
Not every context is good to live in. Living in the wilderness (if you can find any to live in) is tough. Living in a bad country, or a bad economy, is tough. Living in a culture that is hostile or uncaring is tough. * Nor does everyone agree what context is best to live in. So who should decide? * Ideally, everyone gets to live in a context that satisfies them Combining the above two points, we arrive at the vision of Meta-Utopia. No one has to agree with everyone else, they each get to live in the kind of context that they prefer, together with others who have similar preferences. Civilization Civilization is the cooperation of people for mutual gain (win-win). As such, any action contrary to cooperation or mutual gain is contrary to civilization (it is uncivilized), and may warrant a tit for tat response. See also, the so-called paradox of tolerance, which is surprizingly difficult for uncivilized people to comprehend. I'll have to write a clarification in my own words that avoids the semantic confusion between one kind of tolerance/cooperation and the other kind, thus removing the supposed self-contradiciton. For now, read about Tit for Tat game theory, and this good quote from this article: :: "Tolerance is not a moral absolute; it is a peace treaty. ... the model of a peace treaty differs from the model of a moral precept in one simple way: the protection of a peace treaty only extends to those willing to abide by its terms. It is an agreement to live in peace, not an agreement to be peaceful no matter the conduct of others. A peace treaty is not a suicide pact." And on the subject of those last two sentences, see my page: The Main Options in Human Conflict This cooperative view of civilization is contrary to the social darwinist, "neoliberal", and Social Dominance Orientation views, which mistakenly believe that society is defined by competition between people (winners and losers), or aims to make this a reality. In market economies, businesses compete with each other for the same customers. Ideally, the point of the competition is to "win" by being the most beneficial to the customer. Another thought: competition would exist even if civilization (a cooperative effort) did not. So competition logically cannot be a sufficient defining feature of civilization. Good decision making processes for the civilization Democracy I suspect that democracy is best for these kinds of edges and foundations I'm talking about. Situations where we can't really give each subpopulation what they want, and yet we have to get a collective decision. Market Economy At least until we have an extremely advanced artificial intelligence dealing with enough data, a "market" seems to be the best way to handle large and complex economies. Of course, even since ancient times it has been found that a market needs regulations in place to prevent all kinds of undesirable emergent outcomes that might not be foreseen or easily solvable otherwise. And even the basic concepts, such as "ownership" and "property", are human inventions. They could perhaps be engineered better, especially in extreme circumstances which they were not designed for (such as extreme disparities of wealth). Human Rights You want human rights. See also * Building the Perfect Context to Live In. * The Main Options in Human Conflict * Factual Politics * Socialism, Free Markets, Capitalism and Christopher Snowdon